Three years after her story went viral, the Ottawa mother who changed her mind about vaccines says the angry rhetoric around the issue is driving some anti-vax families away from the health system.

“More calm, clear and caring voices need to be heard,” Tara Hills told delegates at the Canadian Immunization Conference.

That is, in part, what led Hills to change her mind about vaccines in 2015 — conversations with an Ottawa mother and health advocate who assured her she wasn’t a bad parent and encouraged her to read the evidence about vaccines.

Parents like Hills are of growing interest to health officials as measles makes a comeback around the world, in part, because of vaccine hesitancy.

In 2015, Hills and her husband were Kanata home-schooling parents of seven children. After growing increasingly concerned about vaccines, the family had stopped immunizing their children. But in 2015, Hills began to re-examine her views and was contacted by an Ottawa woman who runs a blog called The Scientific Parent.

In this file photo, a health worker prepares a syringe with a vaccine against measles.Leo Correa /
AP

“Read everything you can,” Hills was told. “Just check the sources.”

Her research convinced her to resume vaccinating her children. But before she could do so, all seven children were diagnosed with whooping cough — a vaccine preventable disease.

The children all recovered, but Hills said she didn’t need to be told “how much worse it could have been.”

On Tuesday, Hills brought her youngest infant to the conference at the Shaw Centre. The baby girl, like all eight of her siblings now, is up to date with her vaccines.

The family of 11 has stayed out of the limelight since the burst of media attention in 2015.

Hills spoke to a standing-room-only crowd made up mainly of public health workers and officials who are increasingly trying to understand how better to communicate with parents about vaccines.

Vaccine-hesitant parents make up as much as 20 per cent of the population. And with Canada’s rates of childhood immunization some of the lowest among wealthy countries, health officials say it is important to better understand why parents sometimes hesitate to vaccinate their children.

In this Jan. 16, 1957 file photo, Jon Douglas, 6, right, visits his friend, Greg Cox, standing behind a sign warning he has mumps, on the door of his home in Altamont, Ill. Fifty years ago, mumps was once a childhood rite of passage of puffy cheeks and swollen jaws. That all changed with the arrival of a vaccine in the late 1960s, and mumps nearly disappeared. But in 2017, the U.S. is in the midst of one of the largest surges in decades.ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dr. Noni MacDonald, a Dalhousie University professor of pediatrics and vaccine expert, said Canada’s childhood immunization rates make the country “a sitting duck” to see the return of deadly diseases such as the measles.

Germany recently had its first endemic cases of measles since the childhood disease was eradicated there. MacDonald warned that could happen in Canada if the country is complacent about childhood immunization rates.

“We know there have been studies done in different provinces about why we are not getting where we would like to be, and over and over (vaccine) hesitancy is part of it.”

Canada’s overall rate of immunization against measles is in the upper 80s, she said. To prevent measles, it needs to be 95 per cent.

“We just aren’t getting where we need to go.”

MacDonald, who works with the World Health Organization on immunization, said it is embarrassing that Canada doesn’t have higher immunization rates.

“All the public health units are really trying to work on improving immunization uptake, but this is not easy.”

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On Monday, the Canadian Paediatric Society sponsored a day-long workshop on the issue, offering tools to help health-care workers talk to vaccine-hesitant parents. Among key advice: Don’t close the door on them.

Some physicians in the U.S. and elsewhere refuse to see patients who don’t vaccinate their children. Canadian health officials say it is important to continue to treat them and raise the issue when appropriate.

The Canadian Immunization Conference, which is held every two years, is also focusing on the pandemic flu, and marking a century since the deadly Spanish flu.

Nancy Cox, former director of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control’s influenza division, said the conditions are right for a new flu pandemic.

If another one as severe as the Spanish flu occurred, it could kill as many as 110 million people, despite medical advances since 1918.